Proceedings of the
The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
3 – 8 September 2023, Southampton, UK
SafetyKube: Towards Orchestration at the Edge for Critical Production Systems
1Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany.
2Dependable Systems and Software, Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany.
ABSTRACT
Various trends, such as changeable lot-size-1 manufacturing, put production systems under pressure to become more flexible-a (r)evolution referred to as Industry 4.0. While this transformation is challenging for the physical assets, the same is true for the digital infrastructure that drives production. However, timely and flexible orchestration of computing, networking, and storage resources has been tackled by research and implementations in cloud and edge computing. What is missing are safety aspects that are essential in critical production environments. In this paper, we conduct a safety analysis of the orchestration task.We then propose new components for an established orchestration solution (Kubernetes)-allow handling of failure modes present in vanilla Kubernetes. Finally, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of our approach and highlight future research directions to make safe orchestration a reality.
Keywords: Industry 4.0, Safety, Edge computing, Internet of things, Kubernetes, Containers, Orchestration.
